Author: Helena

Democratization as instant coffee?

The NYT has a lovely profile today of someone I have lots of admiration for: the veteran Algerian diplomat (and former Foreign Minister) Lakhdar Brahimi, who has also for the past two years been the UN’s top official in Afghanistan.
The profile is by Carlotta Gall. She gives one tiny vignette that indicates the importance Brahimi has had in the attempt to rebuild Afghanistan almost from scratch. It came from one of last week’s sessions of the country’s just-completed 502-person loya jirga (“big council”):

    [H]e proved his usefulness to the last. He had delayed his departure several times as the loya jirga faltered, and then almost fell apart. Nearly half the delegates boycotted a vote on amendments on Thursday, and tensions were rising as the assembly split along ethnic lines.
    That put the rest of the transition in jeopardy, from the United Nations-run disarmament and demobilization program to elections that, under the Bonn accords, would take place in six months.
    Mr. Brahimi spoke to the delegates boycotting a vote, entering the tent from the side door, slightly hunched in his overcoat. They had shouted down every other official, including their own faction leaders, but had asked for him to mediate. After a day of meetings Friday, delegates were saying that Mr. Brahimi had succeeded in breaking the logjam.

For me, the most significant part of the piece was where Gall was describing a memo that Brahimi recently gave to the still-precarious Afghan government and foreign diplomats in Kabul:

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U.S. Army to expand involuntary service orders

Donna Miles of the Armed Forces Press Service, reported Jan. 2 that the Army would be announcing a further expansion of its existing “stop-loss” program within the next week or two.
No numbers yet.
I wrote more about the “stop-loss” program here Dec. 29. It’s a program of totally involuntary military service imposed on the hard-pressed men and women who are already in the various branches of the armed forces. I titled that post “The draft that dares not speak its name.”
At that point, I was citing press reports that more than 40,000 people had already been affected in the Army program. Plus, an unknown number of members of other branches of the armed forces.

Iraq-Palestine revisited

Yesterday, reader Adel el-Sayed put up a comment onto a post I wrote on JWN Feb. 22 in which I argued against the point of view that, “Anyone who wants a just Palestinian solution should be supporting a war in Iraq… It would be good for Palestinian aspirations.”
Those had been the exact words used by the once-smart (British) Mideast affairs analyst Fred Halliday, writing that week in Salon.com.
Though I have respected Fred’s work a lot in the past, I just could not agree with that assessment. (Read my earlier post for my reasoning there.)
But in general, I think we should all add this whole question of the alleged “Palestinian-Israeli benefits” of a US war to topple Saddam to the Bill of Particulars in which we list the many forms of dishonest argumentation that prior to the March 19 Day of Infamy were used to jerk the US (and UK) publics into supporting the war effort…
The main argument I heard before March 19 from several war supporters was admittedly was a little different from the one that Halliday expressed, though it had the same bottom line: that a US war against Saddam would be good for the Palestinians. It ran roughly as follows:

    (1) The financial support the Saddam Hussein regimes gives to Palestinian “terrorists” is one of the main factors motivating them to continue their actsof otherwise quite inexplicable violence against Israel.
    (2) It is only because of these acts of wanton, quite unprovoked violence that the hard-pressed Sharon is obliged, becuase of its responsibilities to the Israeli public, to retaliate against the Palestinian sources of this terror. Otherwise, this Israeli government—-which is as eager as all Israeli governments are to make peace with its neighbors!–would conclude a reasonable, durable peace with the Palestinians tomorrow.

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April 2003 posts added to “Golden Oldies”

Over the holidays, I added some of my faves from my April 2003 JWN posts to the Golden Oldies listed on the “Main” page of the blog.
April was quite a month, and I had (imho) some pretty good posts then. So check out the Golden Oldies section– it’s near-ish the bottom of the right-hand side-bar on the “Main” page.
(I meant to do May as well. Didn’t have time yet.)

Iraq’s anti-democratic SOFA

Wright and Chandrasekaran, writing in today’s WaPo, have a piece that outlines Colin’s Powell’s plans for the six-month transition to (the appearance of) Iraqi self-rule.
The plans include an inappropriately early deadline for conclusion of a “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA). Hence the headline here.
(The WaPo story uses yet more from Robin Wright’s Dec. 29 interview with Powell… Truly, a gift that has gone on giving, for many days, for the WaPo editors. Plus, today they are actually finally posting the transcript of the whole interview…. So why didn’t they do that right away for the the rest of us poor slobs instead of parceling out the goodies over five days, huh?)
Anyway, the highlights of this timetable for a highly flawed “transition”:

    Feb. 28: deadline for “agreement”–presumably between the Coalition provisional Authority and its near-puppets of the “Iraqi Governing Council”– on the content of “Transitional Administrative Law”. The TAL will basically set the rules for the Rube-Goldberg-style non-election process that will bring into being the “Iraqi Successor Government” that takes over nominal power in the country on or before June 30…
    Mar. 31: deadline for agreement on the “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA) that will govern the continued presence of US troops in Iraq subsequent to the Rube Goldberg process…
    June 30: after completion of the Rube Goldberg process, the “handover” of power to the non-elected body takes place…

What is notable about this timetable? Two main things:

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Z. Schiff dubious of disengagement talk

My old friend Ze’ev Svhiff, the crusty doyen of the Israeli defense correspondents, has an interesting column in Ha’Aretz today in which he seems to be expressing considerable doubts about the effectiveness or perhaps the probability of any unilateral disengegament from parts of the occupied territories, such as has been talked about by Sharon and people close to him in recent week.
Schiff, who is extremely close to numerous current and former high-ups in the IDF General Staff, writes:

    Since Sharon delivered his speech in Herzliya two weeks ago, the IDF has not received even fragments of orders, and the prime minister’s intention remains vague… . So the decision in the army is to wait and do nothing, not even preliminary staff work. Another internal decision is that in any event the IDF must not be involved in recommendations or decisions about which settlements to move or to evacuate.

He also reports that, despite this latter decision, “In the meantime … the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon, has taken a step of his own by stating that the evacuation of the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip, will be a prize to terrorism.”

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Powell plans Saigon-style embassy for Baghdad

The WaPo has spent just about all the past week milking the interview that Colin Powell gave them a few days ago for dribs and drabs of new information. (I guess that’s what you do on a “holiday” news week.)
So today’s drib was served up by Robin Wright in a piece titled “U.S. has big plans for legation in Iraq.”
Oops. Make that “embassy”.
Actually, in a direct quotoid used from the Powell massage-a-thon, Powell is reported as himself being a bit fuzzy as whether the new “thing” actually will be an embassy:

    “The real challenge for the new embassy, so to speak, or the new presence will be helping the Iraqi people get ready for their full elections and full constitution the following year,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview this week.

So let’s just go ahead and call it a Legation, okay? As in Vietnam in the days of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”: “After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by ten,’ and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down the street… Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation…”

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‘Cold Mountain’: Teague as Ashcroft

Just saw the movie of ‘Cold Mountain’. Wept many buckets. Therefore a good movie…
I say that in spite of scenes of gross, unnecessarily large-scale violence in the first 30 minutes that, what’s worse, were accompanied by truly terrible and “theatrical” music. Made me long for “Saving Private Ryan”, where the violence was stomach-churning but much more effective because it was NOT all grand-standish and orchestrated like some grisly version of a Cecil B. De Mille masterpiece.
In fact, since I’d been writing about real violence all day I couldn’t take it, and shielded my eyes from pollution by the cinematic version until Lorna could tell me it was okay to look again. After that, the movie went from strength to strength.
True, I did find it an interesting moral challenge to have the director draw us into the bucolic lifestyle and internal social goings-on of that strongly pro-Confederate community at the beginning. (Like setting a similar kind of movie inside Bavaria in the later days of Nazism, perhaps?)

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Golan– the human dimension

The Sharon government has been hinting that, in the absence of any credible peace diplomacy toward the Palestinians, it might be prepared to resume the long-stalled talks with Syria.
What else is new? The tactic of “threatening” to turn away from one track of the so-called “peace process” (a.k.a. the peace-free process: all process and none of the peace) is an old, old one for Israeli leaders of both major parties.
And then, just as those hints about possible talks with Syria start going around, the Sharon government announces a massive new settlement-building project on the Golan.
Again, so what else is new?
If I seem slightly jaded by all these extremely repetitive shenanigans it’s because back in December 1999 I published a (pretty good) book about the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations of the 1990s– and yes, I really do feel that I’ve seen all of this before.
The book, by the way, builds heavily on interviews I conducted with decisionmakers and analysts in Israel, Syria, and the United States. So it provides a pretty rounded picture that I don’t think is available anyplace else. Check it out!
The two sides actually did come pretty close to nailing down a very multi-dimensional peace agreement during “crash” talks they held under US auspices at the Wye Plantation, in early 1996…

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Palestinian Christmas creche–the photo

In this December 24 post I wrote a bit about how, when I saw how “Christmas” was being widely represented in beijing, it forced me to think more about my own relationship with the Christmas story and Christian belief in general.
I also wrote about the lovely, hand-embroidered set of Christmas figures the Director of the (Palestinian) East Jerusalem YWCA gave our family many years ago. (Hey, it was good post. I hope you read it!)
But I also promised to try to take some pics of the Christmas figures. Here is a picture of the whole creche scene. Mary, Joseph, and babe in the middle. At the left, 3 shepherds in front, 3 Wise Men behind. On the right, 4 Wise Women. Yay for the YWCA!!!
The original photo was by expert photographer and spouse extraordinaire, Bill. (Thanks!) I did a bit of color re-balancing (?) Then I thought it would be good to make the pics come as Popup Images rather than Embedded Images. Do readers have a preference?